Figure 1.--This postcard back portrait shows rwo nunidentified chikldren. All we know for sure is that the porreait was taken in 1925. We think it is Welsh because the portrait was sent bto a Welsh address. Of course it could have been sent from anywhere in the U.K.m butbat the time the friends and families of Welshn people, especially village folk, were primarily in Wales or at least other Welsh peopole. The writing is difficult to read, but a British contribututor has figured it out. He tells us, "It was hard to dechipher the letters in the town, but the last 5 letters were clearly 'cynon'. So I can say that the postcard was not sent to England and neither is it a Scotish place. Cynon is Welsh. It is a place in Wales. Google maps came up with Abercynon. I looked at the postcard and realised the first letter was a capital A. Then I made out the 'b' and then ' er'. The 'cy' are verybclear. So nwe have the small Welsh village of Abercynon. It is about an hour from Cardiff. The big town in the area is Merthya Tydfil."
The earliest Welsh portrait we have found of a boy wearing a sailor suit looks to date from the 1860s. This of course does not mean hat sailor suits were not worn earlier. It is only with the 1860s and the appearsnce of the CDV that we have any number of actual images. Here we have an early example, probaly taken in the 1870s (figure 1). British sailor suits tend to be primarily traditionally styled suits. And as in England by the 1880s and especially the 1890s we see mostly traditionally styled suits throughout Britain including Wales. Ny traditional we mean stripe detailing on a V-collar and back dlap. There was often a dickey between the V which might be removed durring the summer. A 1925 portrait shows these traditional styles being worn into the 1920s. As in England they seemed to have declined in poularity during the 1930s.
